Throughout and within this disclosure are technical and patent publications, referenced by an identifying citation or by an Arabic number. The full bibliographic citation corresponding to the Arabic number is found in the specification, preceding the claims. The disclosures of all references cited herein are incorporated by reference into the present application to more fully describe the state of the art to which this invention pertains.
Autoimmune diseases are caused by an attack of self-tissues by the immune system. An ideal therapy would be one capable of selectively blunting the autoimmune response (against all antigenic epitopes targeted in that disease) without impairing systemic immunity (immune responses to foreign antigens). Unfortunately, the lymphocyte specificities involved in any one autoimmune disease are many and incompletely defined, making this a challenging goal.